Paper Thin Personas • Page 110 of 148 • Rachel Cohen's Paper Doll Creations

Nine Fantastic Printable Paper Dolls from December’s Past

January 11, 2016December 19, 2013

I think I’ve mentioned already that Paper Thin Personas is turning three in January and entering it’s fourth year of life. It’s been three years since the site crashed and I had to start over from scratch. I couldn’t be more pleased with where the blog is now.

But I thought it might be interesting to look back and where PTP came from… So, for today I have combed through the archives and found nine paper dolls from December’s Past that I thought were worth featuring. Step back with me and take a look at what I was drawing two years ago. 🙂

Three Printable Paper Dolls of December 2012

Marisole Monday: In Space!

December 3th, 2012 & December 10th, 2012

Marisole Monday went to space as an alien in color and to be colored. I remember being conflicted about posting the ray guns. There’d been some gun violence around the time I was working on this paper doll set. People were talking about the dangers of toy guns and children. I didn’t get a single complaint about my ray guns.

Shadow & Light Number 22

December 27th, 2012

This paper doll has the dubious honor of being the paper doll set that I spent way to much time on the shading, only to realize I’d done it on the wrong side and having to correct it all on photoshop. I loved the outfit on the right so much that I thought it was worth it. 🙂 Actually, I love both these outfits.

Puck as SuperHero

December 9th, 2012 &December 8th, 2012

I got a request for some superhero Puck paper dolls. I confess openly that I wasn’t totally pleased with how the two of them seemed while I was drawing them, but I wanted to draw some male paper dolls aimed at boys and I thought for sure that boys would be into these options. In the end, I was quite pleased how they came out.

More Here

Get a Free Printable Paper Doll Every Monday Sent to your Web Enabled HP Printer…

May 21, 2020December 18, 2013

I have cool news.

Last year, I was contacted by some people from HP about using my content in a downloadable application for their web enabled printers. After many months of conversation and discussion, I’m excited to announce the Paper Thin Personas App for HP Web Enabled Printers featuring Marisole Monday.

Once the app is installed, a Marisole Monday paper doll will be printed automatically from your web enabled HP printer every Monday in black and white or in full color (you choose when you set up the app).

I’d probably get them in black and white if I had kids, because than the paper dolls become a fun coloring activity. And who doesn’t like fun coloring activities?

(Plus, in an entirely unscientific study done by my friend with her cousins, small children + crayons + black and white paper doll sheets = almost 20 minutes of occupied time. And this time of year, who doesn’t want that?)
A few things you should know… You need a web enabled HP printer to print out the Marisole Monday paper dolls. All of the paper dolls in the App have appeared on the blog in full color before, but not all of them have appeared in black and white.

I think the Paper Thin Personas App is great for parents or grandparents who want something for their kids or grandkids to play with every Monday or if you just want a Monday morning pick me up. It’s really very fun to walk into the room on a blurry-eyed Monday morning and see a paper doll waiting.

Lastly, I have to give a shout out to the wonderful team I worked with. They were all fabulous and made the process quite painless. 🙂

Download the Paper Thin Personas App for HP Wed Enabled Printers Here and have a great holiday season.

Playing with Pattern on Ms. Mannequin Paper Doll Clothes

May 21, 2020December 13, 2013

Today is Friday the 13th which is apparently bad luck, though I have no idea where that came from. Does anyone know? Anyway, I figured a good way to get rid of bad luck was to post some paper doll fashions. 🙂

As a lot of my longtime readers know, I am often playing around with patterns for my printable paper doll clothes. I think pattern, while a pain in the behind, is important for the diversity of paper doll outfits. Solid colors are all well and good, but most of us have some patterned things in our closets and there’s not real good reasons why paper dolls shouldn’t be the same.

When thinking about pattern, I tend to fall into the same styles repeatedly. I suppose I can only be so creative on any given paper doll set. Still, I am always looking for new pattern inspirations- even if they don’t make their way onto the blog. I really admire the pattern work of Julie of Paper Doll School. Her patterns rock.

(She can also use Illustrator. I’m so jealous. I have the program, but I think that like a wild dog it can smell my fear.)

Anyway… Miss. Mannequin and friends are getting pretty girly today with their full patterned skirts and rose printed strapless dress.

{Download a PDF in Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG in Color}{Download a PDF of to Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG to Color} {Get some Paper Dolls to Wear these Clothes} {Get More Clothes for These Paper Dolls}

Before I forget, I wanted to mention that I recently stumbled across a Peal Chang paper doll. Soft Film is a blog devoted to Chinese film, as far as I can tell, and the author commissioned a fantastic paper doll of Pearl Chang, who was an actress. I confess to not being at all familair with Pearl Chang, but I knew the name Kwei-Lin Lum from her incredible paper doll work. Check it out, it’s a pretty neat paper doll.

Of course, now I have to go on Netflix and see if I can find any of these movies. Does anyone know anything about her?

Puck Magnetic Paper Dolls for the Boys

May 21, 2020December 10, 2013

I have a lot of readers who love my magnetic paper dolls (which is understandable, I love them too) and I often get asked about a boy paper doll for the boys out there who might want to play some dress up too.

I don’t have a lot of male paper dolls on this blog (because I don’t find them as interesting as girl paper dolls) and I’ve only done about fifteen Puck paper dolls over the years. The result is that I don’t have a lot of “stock” to pull from when creating a magnetic version. After some debate about what to include, I decided for my first Puck magnetic set (posted early enough for people to print them for the holidays), I would include three boys and some contemporary clothing choices.

The magnetic paper dolls have three sets of shoes, five tops, five bottoms and a few different accessories. All of the pieces can be used interchangeably amongst the three boys, meaning that there’s a lot of fun mix and match outfit options (about 75 different outfits to be exact).

It’s not as exciting as some of my other sets, I confess, but I think they’re very versatile. Since I haven’t done that many Puck paper dolls, it was a little challenging to put together a set for magnetic printing, but I hope this serves some of the readers I have with boys.

Puck Magnetic Paper Dolls Set Number One

{Click Here for a PDF to Print}

Zippers, Ruffles and a New Paper Friend

December 6, 2020December 9, 2013

Today, we have our printable paper doll showing off her slightly girly wardrobe of ruffles in purples and pinks. As you may recall, last week this printable paper doll was in black and white for coloring.

For those of you who play Shadowrun, the little iphone looking device she wears strapped to her arm is her commlink (she’s a technomancer, so she mostly wears one for show) and the glasses are her AR vision glasses. You may need to extend the tabs and paste them together to slip them over her head. For those of you who don’t play Shadowrun, then she’s just a chick with some crazy glasses, a teddy bear and some really ruffled skirts that she likes to wear.

On the left, you can see some of the outfit options. There are actually fifty-two outfit combinations here. (I’ve posted before about how to do paper doll clothing combination math) since everything is mix and matchable. I think there are actually a few more since two of the tops can be worn either over the tanks, as I tend to imagine them, or as separate pieces. If you include the two sweaters as layer pieces than you have 76 outfit options. Not bad for a wardrobe of 13 clothing pieces, not including the gloves or the glasses or the commlink.

Also, apparently I’m not the only one whose ever been possessed to make paper dolls out of Shadowrun races. Personally, I think they’re wonderful paper dolls, but not really my style. My style is much more girly.

{Click Here for a PDF to Print} {Click Here for a PNG to Print} {Click Here for More Marisole Monday & Friends Printable Paper Dolls}Thoughts? Comments? Things you’d like to tell me? Drop me a comment.

Organizing Blog Posts… Calendars and You!

May 21, 2020December 7, 2013

The blog calendar. I never said it was attractive.

I talked about my Red Binder a little while ago. I love my Red Binder, but I wanted to write about the other tool I use for organizing blog posts.

It’s a calendar.

I use Calendar Labs to create my monthly calendars. I like Calendar Labs, because you can choose which day to start your weeks on. Since Marisole and Friends Paper Dolls always post on Mondays, I can choose to start my weeks on Monday, rather than Sunday. I find it’s easier to plan if I do it that way.

As you can see from the photo, the Calendar gets filled in as I figure out what is going to go up each week. I took this photo mid-November when I was still figuring out what the month was going to look like. These posts often change and move, but my general goal is to have two printable paper doll posts and one non-paper doll post each week. At the bottom of the calendar, I keep a list of what posts I think I am going to have completed in time to post them in any given month.

Since I work in spurts to activity, its possible that I might have four or five pages of paper dolls ready to go up. Now, I could post these all in a row… which would be great for five days.

The problem is that the next five days there would be nothing.

In Blogging, consistency is just as important as frequency.

So, while I might want to show off what I’ve done from a long Saturday afternoon spent working on blog things, I know the smart thing to do is to space out the posts and the calendar helps me to do this. It also gives me breathing room and space and makes sure that I know I’m going to have something up each week. It allows me to plan vacations or busy times of my life without having to worry about the blog.

Does it mean I always manage to get up everything I wanted to get up when I wanted to get it up? Nope, often not, but it sure helps me map out each month and it lets me know if I am going to be desperately short.

What I hate, more than anything else, is realizing at 8pm on a Saturday night that I don’t have a Marisole Monday & Friends post even drawn for Monday. Can I get it done in a day? Yes, I can, but I won’t have any fun doing it and the product won’t be very good. So, I usually don’t. I need to know ahead of time if I’m out of scanned materials.

I think sometimes blogs function under the assumption of spontaneity. There is a tendency to assume that someone just sat down at their computer and produced in a moment a wonderfully written post with great photographs.

I don’t really think that happens. (Maybe I’m wrong? Any other paper doll bloggers want to chime in here?)

A great post comes from planning, from knowing what you want to post and then carefully putting it together. It’s a labor of love and it always takes time. Spontaneity is a myth.

Hello! Stella… A New Asian Ms. Mannequin Printable Paper Doll

May 21, 2020December 4, 2013

First of all, Happy Last Night of Hanukkah.

And then… what to say about Stella?

Well… hmmm… I confess I try to avoid talking to much politics on this blog. The truth is that I like paper dolls. My readers like paper dolls. And really… that’s why we’re all here right? To enjoy paper dolls, play with paper dolls and feel guilt free about being in my late twenties and still in love with these tiny ephemeral objects.

Still, I think Stella deserves some commentary. I drew her several years ago, like most of the Mannequin’s while I was reading a book on the history of Asian-American theater, creatively titled, A History of Asian American Theater. I picked it up for a class I couldn’t take and ended up reading it anyway, because I was curious. So, when I sat down to draw my Mannequin heads, as I do when I’m starting a new paper doll series, I was full of thoughts about repression of Asian-Americans and stereotypes of the “oriental”.

I knew I wanted to create diversity in the paper doll series, but I also felt weird drawing an Asian paper doll and not acknowledging that Asia is a very large, very diverse place. Is it fair to simply stick Stella up, note in my tags that she’s Asian and then move on with my life? I just wasn’t and still am not sure.

Which brings us to Stella and what I can say about her. She’s based on no one in particular. I have struggled to draw Asian features, particularly eyes which have epicanthic folds and a single eyelid, for a long time, so I don’t trust myself to do them very well. I think she looks good though. She’s based, very vaguely, off a very kind Korean student I knew and also some Chinese girls who rode the same bus I did in the afternoons and with whom I struck up conversations sometimes. They were both law students.

{Click Here for a PDF in Color} {Click Here for a 150 dpi PNG in Color}{Click Here for a PDF of Black and White} {Click Here for a 150 dpi PNG in Black and White}{Click Here for Clothes for Her}{Click Here for Friends for Her}

Personally, I think Stella is Asian-American, perhaps Chinese or Korean in descent (in honor of my various models), I think she is going to university and studying to become a historian. That’s all I’ve decided about her. Perhaps other people have other ideas?

Poppets Summer Paper Doll to Print

December 6, 2020December 3, 2013

Yes, I know it’s like 30 degrees outside and there’s frost on the grass in the mornings and I’m wearing a wool coat, because I have finally acclimatized to the warmth of Alabama. And I don’t personally wish it was summer. I like the winter. I like the cold. I like rain and grey skys and falling leaves.

However, I also really like cute red-headed paper dolls with shorts and colorful t-shirts.

It was recently pointed out to me that of my white paper dolls, I have a disproportionate number of redheads. This is true. I love red hair. I think it’s wonderful. I don’t have redhair, but I envy people with red hair. Therefore my paper dolls get red-hair more often than perhaps is genetically normal.

Oh, I should mention that I have thought that the sunglasses would work really well and you could hook the two ends together behind the dolls head. When I tried this out, it totally didn’t work, so I recommend taping the ends together and slipping them over the dolls head. My paper engineering skills are in need of some work. I won’t lie about that.

{Download a PDF in Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG in Color}{Download a PDF of to Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG to Color} {More Poppet Printable Paper Dolls}

Seventh night of Hanukkah tonight. I love the end of Hanukkah when all the candles are lit and the menorah glow is so bright and beautiful. As a reminder, these paper dolls are scaled to print out as a half page, not a full page. You are welcome to have your printer scale them up, just be aware that every printer does that differently. 🙂

Zippers & Ruffles: Paper Doll With Clothes to Color

December 6, 2020December 2, 2013

So… this is what you might call a paper doll that got to have an evolution. I originally planned on drawing a more typical cyberpunk set, but um…. I was bored at a thing and I started doodling and the outcome was a drawing of one of my Shadowrun character’s named Claudia.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of my hobbies is playing table top RPGs. I have several favorites, but one of them is Shadowrun, which just came out with a fifth edition rule set. Today’s paper doll is based on my last Shadowrun character, a technomancer named Claudia and her best-friend, an AI inside a teddy-bear named Douglas. (Technically, Douglas should have a suit and a carving knife, but um… that would be creepy.)

By the way, at this point, you might be wondering if its possible that I have any more socially awkward hobbies and the answer is no, I’m just your normal board-game playing, paper doll drawing special collections librarian who sometimes pretends to be an elf (except not really, because I pretty much dislike elves in general. Don’t ask).

{Click Here for a PDF to Print} {Click Here for a PNG to Print} {Click Here for More Marisole Monday & Friends Printable Paper Dolls}I did a few things differently with this paper doll. I redid the face to be a little more like I imagined Claudia looking. It’s not a Marisole face and it’s not a Margot face. I realize this is unusual which is why I have started a new category in Marisole Monday called Other Friends. I have no idea if I’ll do more “unusual” Marisole Monday & Friends paper dolls, but odder things have happened on this blog.

She’ll be up in color next week. 🙂

And Happy Sixth Night of Hanukkah everyone.

The First Buxom & Bodacious Paper Doll in Color

May 21, 2020December 1, 2013

Happy fifth night of Hanukkah. It’s a full color cyberpunk fashion paper doll!

I have to say, I am enjoying trying to get a paper doll posted each night of Hanukkah this year, but I highly doubt I will ever do it again, or at least not until next year, this is stressful. Someone once told me I should do an Advent Calendar with a new paper doll every night until Christmas.

And I thought, Thanks Goodness I’m Jewish and I don’t have to even contemplate trying to pull that off. Scary. (Though I suppose if I did it as a doll the first night and than a dress every other night it might not be so bad…. Nevermind. I’m not doing that. That is insane.)

This evening’s paper doll hails from the new full-figured or curvy series called Bodacious and Buxom. I wanted to use bright cheerful colors and stay away from black which tends to overwhelm my cyberpunky sets. I don’t even know if cyberpunk is still a fashion thing. I mean it was a thing in the 1990s when I was growing up, but is it still a thing?

No matter, I like it and that’s what’s important.

A cyberpunk fashion paper doll whose free to print from paperthinpersonas.com.

{Download a PDF of this paper doll to Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG of this Paper Doll to Color} {More Bodacious and Buxom Printable Paper Dolls}Of course, I did post today’s printable paper doll in black and white for coloring yesterday, so you can color her other ways than how I have- if you wish. I mean, I might be a pink yellow and blue kinda girl, but maybe you’re more into purples? I think a purple and white set might be neat… or blue and black. Either way, there are options which is the important thing.

All right, what do people think? Do they like the new series? Are people as excited about it as I am? Let me know in a comment.

New plus-sized Paper Doll Series Debuts!

May 21, 2020November 30, 2013

Hello all! Happy Fourth Night of Hanukkah!

Tonight, I want to debut my replacement for the Dictionary Girls series of full-figured paper dolls which was in turn a replacement for the Curves series. Entitled Bodacious and Buxom (because my love of alliteration is well established), the new plus-sized paper doll series will post in color and in black and white. Body diversity is something I think is important in the paper doll world, but I also get bored easily and tend to switch things up when I do. The Dictionary Girls series had a fun run, but the feet always bugged me.

Right now, the plan is that Bodacious and Buxom paper dolls will go up one day in black and white and then the following day in color. I might change my mind as the new year continues. Doing paper dolls in both versions always takes more time than doing one or the other, but then I worry about connecting the two sheets. It’s a thought process to be sure.

So, today we have the first of the series in black and white and tomorrow, she will appear in color. I’ve gone back to my love of cyberpunk inspired Sci-fi as a theme here. So, our first paper doll appears with a wardrobe of candy colored outfits and thigh high platform boots. I firmly believe everyone should own thigh high platform boots. (I kid. I don’t own thigh-high platform boots, also I think I would fall over a lot if I did.)

{Download a PDF of this paper doll to Color} {View a 150 dpi PNG of this Paper Doll to Color} {More Bodacious and Buxom Printable Paper Dolls}As with all the new paper doll series, I am nervous when I debut them. I worry people won’t like them or won’t get why I’m changing things. I know that the Dictionary Girls series had some avid supporters. The truth is that I am fickle creature.

Anyway, the Bodacious and Buxom paper dolls are, I hope, going to be around for a while. Happy Hanukkah everyone!

Some more paper doll clothes for the Mannequins…

May 21, 2020November 29, 2013

So… personally, I would love to own that orange dress.

I would wear it around here and people would say, “Are you an Auburn football fan?”

And I would say, “Nope, but I have on a sassy orange dress.”

See? Everything is better when you’re wearing a sassy orange dress. (By the way, I’m neither an Auburn or an Alabama fan, but I’ve learned it’s best not to mention football at all around here unless you really want to be dragged into a conversation about it. Since I can’t stand football, I keep my mouth shut.)

I have no idea how the Ms. Mannequin paper dolls feel about football… I somehow seem them as being more polo types, but that’s perhaps an unfair sterotype of the rich. Not being rich, I really have no idea what absurdly wealthy people do for fun. (I always assume my paper dolls are absurdly wealthy, since they have such large wonderful designer clothes.)